Abstract
AbstractMany safety‐related systems are evolving into cyber‐physical systems (CPSs), integrating information technologies in their control architectures and modifying the interactions among automation and human operators. Particularly, a promising potential exists for enhanced efficiency and safety in applications such as autonomous transportation systems, control systems in critical infrastructures, smart manufacturing and process plants, robotics, and smart medical devices, among others. However, the modern features of CPSs are ambiguous for system designers and risk analysts, especially considering the role of humans and the interactions between safety and security. The sources of safety risks are not restricted to accidental failures and errors anymore. Indeed, cybersecurity attacks can now cascade into safety risks leading to physical harm to the system and its environment. These new challenges demand system engineers and risk analysts to understand the security vulnerabilities existing in CPS features and their dependencies with physical processes. Therefore, this paper (a) examines the key features of CPSs and their relation with other system types; (b) defines the dependencies between levels of automation and human roles in CPSs from a systems engineering perspective; and (c) applies systems thinking to describe a multi‐layered diagrammatic representation of CPSs for combined safety and security risk analysis, demonstrating an application in the maritime sector to analyze an autonomous surface vehicle.
Highlights
The innovation in cyber-physical systems (CPSs) opens a rising field of multi-disciplinary cooperation, linking computer science and control theory with several engineering areas, natural sciences, and medicine.[1]
In the autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) architecture, a programmable controller on-board reads the inputs from these sensors and processes them according to a control logic, providing the system with the capability to operate in autopilot mode while navigating at sea according to a pre-established route
Interface Human role PotenƟally hazardous energy flows between safety and security sources of risk leading to physical harm as the cascade of UFoI into Uncontrolled Flow of Energy (UFoE), that is, as Uncontrolled Flows of Information and Energy (UFoI-E).[104]. This concept of UFoI-E is compatible with the notion of security for safety,[68] where the focus is to enhance safety risk analysis considering the evolving types of physical and cyber-attacks that could lead to physical harm in CPSs
Summary
The innovation in cyber-physical systems (CPSs) opens a rising field of multi-disciplinary cooperation, linking computer science and control theory with several engineering areas, natural sciences, and medicine.[1]. Considering the promising developments and the critical applications of CPSs, government agencies and industrial partnerships regard the research efforts in CPSs as a priority.[5] publications in the field of CPSs have experienced a positive exponential rate in annual publications since Hellen Gill coined the term in 2006 at the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States.[6,7] The relations between levels of automation and human supervision are ambiguous in CPSs. For instance, the NSF defines CPSs as “engineered systems that are built from, and depend upon, the seamless integration of computation and physical components.”[9] In similar terms, Rajkumar et al.[1] characterized CPSs as “physical and engineered systems whose operations are monitored, controlled, coordinated, and integrated by a computing and communication core.”.
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